How Market Research Shapes Market Spatiality: A Global Governmentality Perspective

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published online 19 October 2012Journal of MacromarketingSofie Møller Bjerrisgaard and Dannie Kjeldgaard

How Market Research Shapes Market Spatiality: A Global Governmentality Perspective

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How Market Research Shapes MarketSpatiality: A Global GovernmentalityPerspective

Sofie Møller Bjerrisgaard1 and Dannie Kjeldgaard2

AbstractThis article focuses on how various ideological representations of the market—most notably the myth of the global market—produce certain effects on the way in which market spaces materialize and simultaneously draw the contours of ideal organiza-tional and consumer subjectivities. We employ a governmentality perspective to address global myth market creation and hencethe emergence of ‘‘glocal’’ market spaces. That is, the article explores how representations of glocal markets create specificinterventions in the form of marketing tactics that subsequently have performative consequences for interorganizational andintraorganizational as well as consumer subject positions.

Keywordsmarket research, globalization, myth markets, governmentality, macromarketing

Beginning in 2007, chocolate consumers worldwide may have

noticed a range of new products, packaging, commercials, and

distribution channels from the chocolate manufacturer Anthon

Berg—one of the oldest and best known Danish brands with a

history reaching back to 1884. Particularly notable are the com-

pany’s continuous engagement in organic cocoa production

and educational programs for children in Ghana, its investment

in new production facilities with a complete in-house manufac-

ture of chocolate mass (the only such facility in Scandinavia),

and its striking economic success. These changes were the

result of a brand repositioning strategy developed by the

advertising agency DDB to transform the brand ‘‘from dusty

grandma to modern hedonist’’ (DDB strategy document). The

Anthon Berg CEO evaluated the success of the repositioning

and the experience of economic growth as ‘‘an outcome of the

focus to transform Anthon Berg into a leading international

brand of high quality chocolate’’ (Politiken 2008).

The task was therefore to transform the image of a brand

perceived to be somewhat old fashioned or even kitschy into

a brand that appealed to contemporary consumers. Specifically,

the repositioning encompassed the redesign of all product

packaging, including the distinctive pink wrapping of the

firm’s iconic ‘‘marzipan bread’’; the opening of a luxurious

flagship chocolatier shop, ‘‘A Xoco,’’ in Copenhagen’s most

fashionable shopping area; distribution of the A Xoco brand

through high-end department stores in the United States and

Japan; and the development of novel products that combine

aroma therapeutic ingredients with high-quality chocolate.

One new product, Courage, is a 400-g oval block of high-

quality chocolate, wrapped in a stylish dark green/turquoise/

golden packaging that includes a wooden stick for breaking the

thick chocolate into attractively uneven bite-sized pieces. Accord-

ing to a senior strategic planner at DDB, the idea inspiring this

product is to combine consumers’ increasing interest in the qual-

ity, origin, and history of the cocoa bean (denoted as consumer

connoisseurship) with the demand for brands that serve as ‘‘social

glue’’ and enable consumers to feel part of a community. The

socializing aspect of Courage resides in the ‘‘happening’’ of

breaking and sharing the chocolate. One of the marketing efforts

related to Courage in Denmark features a double-page advertorial

in the fashion magazine Costume, in which predominantly female

consumers are presented with a combination of fashion items—

ranging from underwear to handbags, shoes, dresses, and makeup

to chocolate (Courage, by Anthon Berg) and sparkling wine—that

should assure a perfect cocktail party.

The marketing communication hence assembles objects into

a desirable lifestyle, supposedly reflecting a more contempo-

rary consumer profile than had previously been associated with

the brand. Furthermore, the overall strategy was to address such

a consumer on a more global scale than had previously been the

definition of the brand’s market space.

1 Business Kolding, Denmark2 Department of Marketing and Management, University of Southern Denmark,

Odense, Denmark

Corresponding Author:

Dannie Kjeldgaard, Department of Marketing and Management, University of

Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark

Email: [email protected]

Journal of Macromarketing00(0) 1-12ª The Author(s) 2012Reprints and permission:sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0276146712462891http://jmk.sagepub.com



The case of Anthon Berg illustrates the concrete consequences

of a brand repositioning strategy and its materialization into new

products, distribution channels, and market communication. Such

brand repositioning does not appear as a tabula rasa but is under-

taken for purposes of institutional legitimacy as well as organiza-

tional and individual sense-making (Weick 1995), grounded in

particular knowledge claims of the market, in this case achieved

through global market research.

In this article, we explore one method of global market

research, termed SignBank, in the worldwide advertising

agency DDB. We follow the implementation of a new method

of market research in the global advertising agency and

especially how this method affects the promotion of the agency

in the market for clients, the agency’s specific advice to clients,

and ultimately the sociospatial configuration of market spatial-

ity. We focus on global/local distinctions in the formation of

market spaces emanating from marketers’ attempts to navigate

in a globalizing world. The significance of the spatial arrange-

ments of markets becomes particularly pertinent as globaliza-

tion processes intensify, with the result that marketplace

actors are increasingly reflexive (Giddens 1990; Waters

2001). The Anthon Berg brand illustrates how market research

structures brand repositioning and its materialization in product

development as well as the distribution of the repositioning

across new spatial configurations. The dual elements of

representation of markets and the performativity of market

spaces and market subject positions are explored from the

perspective of global governmentality.

The article’s argument follows the recent stream of literature

addressing the internal logic and modes of operation of marketing

practices by providing a look inside marketing (Zwick and Cayla

2010). This critical view on marketing practices replaces the

positivist managerial dominance of marketing theory with a per-

spective that addresses the ways in which marketing practices are

central to the functioning of contemporary global markets. The

notion of performativity suggests that marketing research

practices are not only descriptive or normative but also creative,

in that they engage in processes of creating the reality they were

set out to present (Law 2009). This makingup of reality happens in

a complex interrelationship between historically embedded mar-

ket actors and techniques. More precisely, marketing practices

continuously stabilize/destabilize in sociohistorically contingent

ways the naturalized cultural categories constituting and enabling

economic transactions (Kjellberg and Helgesson 2007).

One predominant but poorly described cultural category in

the marketing field is that of ‘‘the market,’’ which is often

depicted as ‘‘a universal category of exchange relations, some-

thing immutable and natural rather than historically contingent

and culturally constructed’’ (Zwick and Cayla 2010, 4). Hence,

the study of marketing practices reveals the relationship

between the practices and techniques employed by marketers,

the power relations they produce, and the emergent subject

positions available for marketers and consumers alike.

The particular focus of this article is on how various

ideological representations of the market—most notably the

myth of the global market—produce certain effects on the way

in which market spaces materialize and simultaneously draw

the contours of ideal organizational and consumer subjectiv-

ities. We employ a governmentality perspective to address

global myth market creation and hence the emergence of glocal

market spaces. That is, the article explores how representations

of glocal markets create specific interventions in the form of

marketing tactics that subsequently have performative

consequences for interorganizational and intraorganizational

as well as consumer subject positions.

This article contributes to the myth-marketing literature

(Holt 2004; Thompson and Tian 2008) by demonstrating how

myth-marketing works in a globalized context, hence empiri-

cally extending myth marketing beyond the nation-state as the

core organizing frame for ideological tension and mythological

competition. We also address how myth marketing operates in

business-to-business contexts by constructing the sociospatial

frame of the market and the client and organizational subject

positions available within that frame. We therefore demon-

strate how myth marketing is as much a sense-making and

enactment exercise of the organization’s market and client sub-

jects as it is an addressing of the anxieties of business-to-

consumer marketers operating in a seemingly chaotic global

market.

In the following, we discuss the lack of attention in marketing

to the spatial dimension of market emergence and the unques-

tioned reproduction of methodological nationalism (Wimmer

and Glick-Schiller 2002). Subsequently, we summarize the few

contributions of marketing to the discussion of market spatiality

and introduce the key theoretical concepts from sociology and

cultural geography on which we base our analysis.

Marketing Practices, Marketing Space

As proposed above and in the literature, the concept of ‘‘the

market’’ is predominantly represented in the marketing field

as a pregiven entity external to the actions and thoughts of mar-

keting practitioners. The myth-marketing literature (e.g.,

Thompson and Tian 2008; Giesler 2008; Holt 2004; Penaloza

2000) circumvents this hegemony and contains a number of

contributions that discuss the production of market realities

within particular sociohistoric contexts. One example exam-

ines how the complex development of competitive, historical,

and ideological narratives about particular places underlies and

influences contemporary marketers’ strategies in promoting

consumer cultural lifestyles that reference particular sociohis-

toric spaces such as, in the United States, The South (Thomp-

son and Tian 2008). Myth-marketing literature has also

demonstrated the embeddedness of multiple marketplace actors

in mythologies of particular places—for example, how consu-

mers and producers are involved in a process of marketplace

cocreation by leveraging particular marketplace mythologies

such as the American West (Penaloza 2000).

However, despite critical engagement with the notions of

the market and market-making, much myth-marketing

literature reproduces the spatial dimension of markets along

national lines of division. Holt (2004) attributes the potency

2 Journal of Macromarketing 00(0)



of iconic brands to their capacity to ‘‘address the collective

anxieties and desires of a nation’’ (p. 6, emphasis added).

Another stream of marketing literature emphasizes how

market spaces emerge progressively in deterritorialized form—

hence questioning the nation-state as the naturalized unit of

analysis for researchers and practitioners of international

marketing—and particularly emphasizing how incongruence is

increasing between social practices and bounded spaces (Cayla

and Arnould 2008; Giddens 1990). This stream sees markets

as more and more delineated by deterritorialized space of mean-

ings, with social interaction defining a new spatiality for the

study of brands and marketing. The study of deterritorialized

meaning practices has been conducted in relation to migration

(Penaloza 1999), the idea of global consumers (Holt, Quelch,

and Taylor 2004), youth culture (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard

2006), and geographically dispersed brand communities (Muniz

and O’Guinn 2001). However, these studies are not preoccupied

by the materialization of market spaces, as these spaces are

formed in/through transnational phenomena.

Spatial metaphors and conceptions therefore influence how

marketers relate to and ultimately coconstruct market spaces.

In her analysis of marketing and modernity, Lien (1997) dis-

cusses how spatial metaphors of the market serve to make the

abstract notion of a market comprehensible and concrete to

practitioners. Discursive representations of the spatial delinea-

tions of the market, such as being in/out of a market or visual

representations of market share within a given product and/or

national context, create the appearance of the market as an

entity external to and independent from the practitioners

themselves. In this way, the market becomes manageable.

Discursive representations of marketplace spatiality are

engaged in the formation of markets and thus guide, structure,

and legitimize marketing action (Lien 1997, 95). A similar

argument holds that brand managers undertake the manufactur-

ing of a regional, Asian identity position through regional

branding strategies (Cayla and Eckhardt 2008). This argument

emphasizes how brand managers downplay the national origin

of these brands and amplify a sense of Asianness by mobilizing

urban milieus and young cosmopolitan consumers to facilitate

an imagined Asian community and hence accentuates the role

marketing managers play in place-making projects.

The relative lack of engagement with the spatial dimension of

marketplace systems means that the marketing field risks

myopically reproducing a notion of market spatiality defined by

conventional categories (such as the nation) as given externally

to social actors. In other words, research needs to address the pro-

duction of the spatial configuration of markets. The study of mar-

keter and consumer practices gives access to reflect on the ways in

which market spatiality arises.

Marketing and Global Governmentality

In the following, we apply the Foucauldian notion of

governmentality to explicitly address the spatial configuration

of markets, as these are shaped through practices of global

market research. That is, we use the governmentality

perspective to address how global market spaces emerge

through marketing practices.

Foucault defined governmentality as ‘‘the ensemble formed

by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the

calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very

special albeit complex form of power which has as its target

populations’’ (Rose 1990, 5). The definition designates the two

analytically separate yet intricately related elements of

knowledge and intervention as the defining features of govern-

mentality. That is, on the one side governmentality denotes the

regimes of knowledge or rationalities that render social reality

knowable, and on the other side acknowledges the techniques

used to act on and transform social reality. For the study of

marketing practice, governmentality implies simultaneous

attention to the representations of markets and consumers and

the technologies of interventions.

Studies of governmentality challenge conventional units

and scales of analysis in moving beyond traditional distinctions

of the individual versus the social and micro versus macro

(Miller and Rose 2008, 21), most notably by identifying and

analyzing assemblages of social phenomena. The notion of

governmentality has hence become central in the study of

increasingly global and translocal reality, often denoted as glo-

bal governmentality (Larner and Walters 2004). This perspec-

tive questions the naturalized conceptualization of markets as

spatial and often complying with national boundaries. We

acknowledge a range of exceptions to the predominant metho-

dological nationalism in the studies of marketplace practices

theorized in the light of global/local interplays, center-

peripheries, flows, and disjuncture (Cayla and Arnould

2008). However, these studies continuously operate as if the

local/global spatial allusions are self-evident, as reflected in a

recent critique from cultural geography: ‘‘Over and again, the

counterposition of local and global resonates with an equation

of the local with realness, with local place as earthy and mean-

ingful, standing in opposition to a presumed abstraction of

global space’’ (Massey 2005, 183). In discussing space, Massey

(2005) suggests that the understanding of space and place in

Western philosophy and social theory is permeated by a

number of unarticulated assumptions, including the

assumptions of the local and global illustrated.

Global governmentality denotes an analytical perspective

that examines how ‘‘the global’’ is brought into existence

through imaginaries, technologies, and practices that

circumvent the nation-state as the naturalized category organiz-

ing the social into the spatial. From this perspective,

globalization does not denote any kind of totality or suggest

a certain homogeneity. Rather, globalization remains an analy-

tical concept that must be empirically explored through the

careful study of everyday practices and discourses (Marcus and

Saka 2006; Ong and Collier 2005). Consequently, even though

naming is an act of power in itself, the notion of globalization

should not suggest one particular a priori characterization of an

empirical phenomenon. Global governmentality furthermore

denotes the investigation of power relations beyond the

nation-state (Larner and Walters 2004), as it becomes

Bjerrisgaard and Kjeldgaard 3



increasingly obvious that social phenomena are spatially

nonisomorphic with standard sociological and anthropological

units of analysis such as the nation-state, tribe, or community

(Ong and Collier 2005).

This view leads to a reconfiguration of social analytical

categories and methodologies (Beck 2004; Marcus 1995). The

investigation of how the spatial dimension of marketplaces is

formed and inscribed in thought is particularly important, as

it coconstructs ‘‘the market’’ in and through which marketplace

meanings and values are produced, circulated, and consumed.

Hence, such an approach refrains from characterizing

globalization as a political, social, cultural, technological, or

economic force underlying contemporary society or driving it

in a certain direction. Instead, globalization comes to denote

the emerging, contested, and enacted process through which

spatiality enters our imageries of the world through highly

contextualized technologies, discourses, and practices. Thus,

global governmentality as an analytical perspective holds

important implications for the understanding of space. It

questions the self-evidence of spaces as static and geographi-

cally bounded areas whose identities are homogenously created

through opposition toward some specific outside. Instead,

spaces emerge through the practices, discourses, and relations

of social actors (Massey 2005).

The concept of governmentality is not new to the marketing

field. However, heretofore it has mainly been applied to show

how consumers are expected to act on themselves to become

the ‘‘right kind.’’ That is, studies have examined how

marketing practices and discourses powerfully establish

normative representations of possible lives, which then operate

as an internalized yardstick for the conduct of the individual

consumer (e.g., Hodgson 2002; Miller and Rose 2008).

Drawing on the notion of the culture of the customer (du Gay

and Saleman 1992), researchers have argued that both

consumers and employees become the targets of marketing

governmentality, because they are increasingly expected to

work on themselves to become flexible, service-minded, and

disciplined providers of customer satisfaction operating in the

name of profitability (Skalen, Felleson, and Fougere 2006).

Through the study of marketing history, these authors

demonstrate how the ideal of customer orientation has become

ever more deeply embedded in marketing thought and thus

affects the employee in new and more intimate ways.

Three aspects of the DDB case offer possible perspectives

for approaching the present analysis of global marketing

governmentality. First, the implementation of a novel method

of market research imposes new modes of conduct on employ-

ees at the advertising agency, who invest their private as well as

professional selves in the sense-making processes and become

the self-managing, enterprising selves foreseen by du Gay and

Saleman (1992). Second, the implementation of SignBank sets

new standards for the conduct of agency clients and subtly

inscribes an imperative of globalism, which reconfigures their

market reality and alters their marketing practices. Third, the

marketing practices analyzed govern the conduct of consumers,

furthering their compliance with certain aspirational lifestyles

and requiring them (within a reconfigured market space) to mold

themselves to become the right kind of desiring self, as touched

upon in the opening description of the assemblage of Anthon

Berg products to suggest a particular consumer lifestyle. The

analysis in this article addresses the second of these three aspects

and explores how global marketing governmentality works in

the context of market research, since market research ‘‘sets

parameters around spatial heterogeneity by extracting and

mapping diversity in space, but they do not eliminate difference.

Instead they reproduce a rational system of control in a new

cartography of difference and identity’’ (Maxwell 1996, 121).

The quotation expresses how market research functions in a

globalizing world. It describes how these marketing prac-

tices—whose data production takes place in particular localities

to strengthen transnational corporations’ ability to move closer

to consumer desires and aspirations—engage in the reconfigura-

tion of market spaces. In describing the context and method of

this study, we sketch the empirical and methodological founda-

tion for analyzing how globalization discourses function as a

myth and charter for marketing practitioners (Applbaum 2000)

and institute an ideoscape of globalism (Appadurai 1990), which

powerfully transforms marketplace spatiality and market actor

subjectivities on the level of agency clients.

Method and Context

To study the emergence of global market spaces through situated

marketing practices may seem both pretentious and oxymoronic.

However, one way to reach global ventures is through the dis-

courses, imaginations, and practices of people who navigate an

increasingly connected and interdependent globe. We argue that

market research practitioners in advertising are central actors or

cognitive map makers and that exploring their activities facili-

tates a bottom-up approach to understanding the spatial config-

urations of market spaces. We apply the extended case method

(Burawoy 1998), or ethnographic case method (Visconti

2010), in an attempt to develop theory in an iterative analytical

process that moves between micro-level data—interview

narratives, participant observation, and document data—and

macro-level constructs, which in our case are market spaces. Our

research focuses on the way in which employees of the

advertising agency DDB, in particular strategic planners, have

developed and used a novel global market research method in

new product development and branding.

Market and consumer research constitute central practices

of knowledge production that establish versions of market

reality and consumer subjectivity to be used within

organizations to align organizational supply with consumer

preferences. Previous research has analyzed these practices

with respect to the ideological templates employed for making

sense of markets and consumers. Within this perspective, we

draw on Law (2009), who argues that measurement practices

not only engage in neutral descriptions of reality but also

in creating ideological and embedded versions of reality.

Researchers have given particular attention to the emergence

of consumer subjectivity and its embeddedness in certain




cultural, political, and economic contexts (Arvidsson 2004;

Cochoy 2005). For example, the economic boom in the post–

World War II era, combined with accelerating urbanization,

social mobility, increase in mass media broadcasting, and the

development of new market research methods, may have

created the conditions for a renewed understanding of the

consumer as a creative, mobile, and lifestyle-oriented

individual (Arvidsson 2004). This knowledge then forms the

foundation for contemporary processes of value cocreation,

in which companies capitalize on the creativity and mobility

of consumers.

The focus of other research has been the negotiation of legiti-

macy of marketing and advertising as central market institutions

through the association of consumer choice with democratic vot-

ing (Schwartzkopf 2011). However, while these studies mark the

dependence of consumer subjectivity on socioeconomic devel-

opment, institutional powers, and players and the development

of new market and consumer research methodologies, they leave

the consequences of the spatial configuration of markets unex-

plored. The omnipresent discourse of globalization and the glo-

balization of marketing ideology makes the examination of how

global market spaces are produced in and through marketing

practices even more relevant.

SignBank, the method of research we investigate, is

emically described as a global ethnographic market research

method. SignBank was implemented during 2004–06 through-

out sixty DDB offices on five continents. SignBank emerged

from the DDB planning department’s frustration with the

actionability and predictive potential of existing market

research. In the DDB organization more widely, a sense of

emergency—stemming from a perception of intensified

competition, consumer empowerment, and technological

development—stimulated the search for new routes to market

and consumer insights. SignBank is generally understood as

radically different from more conventional ways of generating

knowledge about markets and consumers. This difference lies

mainly in the fact that it is the employees at DDB who collect

the data and that the method enables a distinct and novel

perspective for understanding markets and consumers, as

exemplified by the following quotation:

I think that’s what SignBank does, it gives you permission, and

this is an important point, it gives you permission to look at other,

seemingly unrelated areas and allow yourself to try to make the

connection between those things. Other methods don’t allow

these relations. . .. SignBank allows us to look everywhere for

solutions (Jefri, Managing Director, DDB Singapore).

We describe the nature of the SignBank method further below.

Despite the perception of uniqueness surrounding SignBank,

the method is seen as a natural extension of the DDB culture,

which is encapsulated in the values, humanity, and creativity

that figure significantly in the minds of informants. Figures 1

and 2 present central visual representations of the SignBank

method and were used in the description of the method to

stakeholders internal and external to the DDB organization.

The fundamental purpose of SignBank is to mobilize

employees at DDB globally to detect changes in everyday

Figure 1. Emic visualization of interpretation process (Source: DDB).




culture. Such changes are labeled signs, and diverse examples

include an increased number of children applying for the Dan-

ish Royal Ballet School, production of cupcakes in larger sizes,

or groups of friends purchasing shared cemetery plots. Employ-

ees at DDB are instructed to report all sorts of small changes

happening around them. In Figure 1, the signs are marked as

small stars at the lower part of the figure. When each office has

collected a critical mass of signs (600–2,000), these are

grouped together around issues by designated ‘‘Friends of

SignBank,’’ and through a process of interpretation the issues

are transformed into so-called cultural narratives. Taken

together, these cultural narratives are imagined to point toward

an overall direction of cultural development, which can then be

used to understand the world in all its complexity and also to

inform the work of DDB.

As Figure 2 illustrates, SignBank is further based on the

idea of orchestrating the interpretation of signs and formulat-

ing cultural narratives on national, regional, and global levels,

which should enable SignBank to provide clients with locally

situated yet nationally, regionally, or globally relevant

knowledge about cultural changes and tendencies. The

accumulation of the cultural narratives on various spatial

scales (national, regional, and global), as implied in Figure 2,

suggests a certain cognitive map, which is exactly the locus of

attention for our analysis.

Our study builds on twenty narrative interviews as well

as participant observation at seminars and meetings, media

data, and numerous documents describing and employing

the SignBank method for both internal and external

organization purposes. Our data analysis proceeded through

several steps. We first coded each type of data separately,

giving special attention to thematic issues such as consu-

mers, competitors, clients, the roles of market research, the

differentiating elements of SignBank compared to other

methods, and so on. All interviews contained both prompted

and unprompted reflections on globalization in terms of

what it is and its implications for consumers, clients, and

the agency. The interviews in particular pointed our

attention to the very strong discursive division between

SignBank and other methods of market research, which

allowed us to organize our analysis into ‘‘before’’ and

‘‘after’’ SignBank. Then, we continued with a comparison

across categories of data, which revealed a rather strong dis-

crepancy between the formal description of the SignBank

method as it is represented in the document material and the

everyday use of SignBank in relation to client businesses, as

described in client presentations and interviewees’ narra-

tives of their everyday work. These analytical steps crystal-

lized three discourses of globalization, each sustained by a

different logic of the spatial configuration of contemporary

markets and each serving a different purpose of the organi-

zation. These three discourses constitute the foundation for

our data analysis.

Findings

The following analysis focuses on the ways in which the mar-

ket is spatially constructed in/through the SignBank method.

DDB SignBank the Pyramid game...

National Stories

Regional Stories

Global Story

Figure 2. Emic visualization of spatial levels of interpreation (Source: DDB).




This interpretive process of market enactment takes place at

two levels. First, the advertising agency is engaged in the enact-

ment of a new market for itself. SignBank produces representa-

tions of a global market reality, of which DDB becomes a

savvy navigator and establishes itself as an expert in global

consumer cultural knowledge vis-a-vis clients. Second, Sign-

Bank assists the agency in mapping new market terrains for its

clients, which as the analysis shows materialize in a reconfi-

gured marketing system forming new social spatialities.

Making Sense of Glocal Markets

The empirical material related to SignBank contains three dis-

courses of globalization. Each discourse enacts a certain spatial

market configuration—one establishing a homogenous and

interconnected global whole, one envisioning a multiplicity

of coexisting localities, and one evoking deterritorialized cul-

tural narratives.

The first discourse addresses the global scope of SignBank

and the ability to mediate a sense of connectedness to the global

world. Such imagined potential to represent ‘‘the global’’

within one all-inclusive and homogenous depiction of markets

is considerably valuable for the DDB organization because it

legitimizes the organization as an expert regarding global mar-

kets. The following comments reflect the enthusiasm and hopes

put into the realization of a dream.

Imagine the spectacular global stories we can make with Sign-

Bank! (Strategic planner, DDB New York).

People working on SignBank tend to be the smarter ones, the

kind of people you really want to be around—those with a more

European mindset. You are not always surrounded by them

(Strategic planner, DDB New York).

The knowledge amassed in SignBank is explicitly categorized

as having the potential to become global through the reworking

and interpretation by the DDB employees, as Figure 2 shows.

The sense of being in touch with and being connected to the

world at large provides the planning community with a feeling

of powerfulness, which differentiates SignBank from other

types of market research. This discourse parallels Holt, Quelch,

and Taylor’s (2004) report on global brands that seem to ema-

nate an ‘‘aura of excellence.’’ In a similar way, the global scope

of SignBank seems to function as a magical mantra that enacts

a global market position for the agency, facilitates access to cli-

ent and media relations, and makes the global visible and man-

ageable to the organization. The discourse of a globally

homogenous world envisions DDB employees as members of

a cosmopolitan professional class, embedded in a transnational

network as opposed to locally or nationally oriented organiza-

tional networks. The notion of ‘‘a more European mindset’’ in

the quotation suggests a self-ascription to such a ‘‘cosmopoli-

tan’’ position.

The second discourse of place involves the possibility for

the agency to produce knowledge about markets and consu-

mers ‘‘elsewhere.’’ These stories of what happens in other

places are not necessarily perceived as having any immediate

relevance for all clients, but the ability to report on ‘‘other pos-

sible lives’’ (Appadurai 1990) establishes each locality (nation,

region) as a spatial referent.

In terms of being able to put your finger on the pulse of what is

going on in various regions, globally and how they differ—that’s

of major importance (Head of Global PR, DDB New York)

Whereas the former discourse of place represents the market as

spatially connected and homogeneous within a global web of

social relations, this discourse evokes a spatial representation

of markets that emphasizes the coexistence of multiple spatial

configurations (one locality next to the other). The organiza-

tional competence derived from this spatial configuration is

one of the comparison between otherwise distinct and unique

consumer cultures. These two discursive representations of

market spatiality seek to naturalize and legitimize the global

arrangement of marketing practices through reference to the

wider acceptance and interest by other market actors. Further-

more, these discourses reflect the organization and the idea of

the SignBank method and as such demonstrate how the market

environment is integral to marketing practice and emerges from

the marketing practice itself. Hence, SignBank displays a com-

plex global market reality to which DDB and its creative solu-

tions become the obvious answer.

The discourses of place emerging here bear the hallmarks of

the assumptions outlined by Massey (2005)—‘‘putting your

finger on the pulse’’ of the local markets is abstracted into a

notion of a kind of global panopticon in which the agency is

capable of seeing the whole through an overview of all of the

parts (regions, countries). While this view seems to reproduce

predominant notions of spatiality (local places /global spaces),

the process of transforming local signs into global stories has

implications for market spatiality. One might interpret the spe-

cific understanding of the global and the local as a global space

in which ‘‘the local’’ actually becomes topographical features

of a market globality. This representation of globalization

places DDB employees in the role of the cultural anthropolo-

gist who knows cultures from the inside. The official SignBank

method prescribes the interpretation of signs to take place

within the context in which the signs have been identified and

thus establishes employees as cultural experts. Furthermore, in

concordance with scientific ethnographic methodology, the

validity of SignBank is ascribed to the establishment of a hol-

istic understanding of the meaning system of a given culture.

The notion of cultural narratives, introduced in the descrip-

tion of SignBank, establishes the third discourse of place. The

empirical material conveys a certain ambiguity concerning the

spatial configuration instituted by the cultural narratives. On

one side the legitimacy of these cultural narratives is based

on their connection to particular localities through local signs

and the detection of similar cultural changes in several local-

ities/nations. This representation is prevalent in Figure 2 which

shows the connection between the national, regional, and glo-

bal levels of the cultural narratives. Informants’ accounts of the




validity of SignBank also refer to this spatial configuration,

which reproduces the anthropological dictum of ‘‘having been

there’’ as the primary source of validity. The following quota-

tion exemplifies how the local and the global are related

through the cultural narratives:

I think that the idea can be assured globally. I generally think it’s

maximized when the actual interpretation of that idea is done at

the local market level. So I’ll give you an example of it; so this

brand of cleaning products has always been about these disinfect-

ing products. So both in Latin America and in North America we

came up with the idea that it was all about growing happy healthy

kids so it wasn’t about killing germs it was about the kids you

grow. So that’s a North American idea, and you have to look

at how that interprets itself in Buenos Aires. It might be really

different than how it might manifest itself in China, what is a

happy healthy kid, how is motherhood portrayed, all of those

things have very local cultures associated with them. So, I do

believe that ideas transcend, but are interpreted when they’re

brought to life at the local market level. So in my sense there’re

some fat things that people will love in every culture, you know

like having healthy kids right, so the core of the ideas can be the

same, but I think the local market interpretations will always be

really valuable (Managing director, San Francisco).

The spatial imagery represented in the quotation illustrates

how SignBank refrains from the conventional representation

of market realities along predefined categories of nation-states

and replaces it with an imagery of cultural narratives that cut

across national borders but emerge in culturally specific ways

in different contexts. However, at the same time this representa-

tion upholds the importance of geographical representation as a

substantial source of validity. One example of a regional cultural

narrative is the European story labeled ‘‘I-collectivism,’’ which

portrays consumers in the following way:

We sample and snack. But in doing so, we have disconnected

and as a result we are starting to feel the sense of isolation.

We want to get our bearings back. We seek grounding and cen-

ters of gravity but within new paradigms.

From the ‘‘collective’’ to the ‘‘selective.’’ Having chucked

institutionally driven collectives, we seek a sense of belonging

but in a transient and customized way depending on self interest

and self expression. . .. We ‘‘tribe up’’ for social glue, belonging

and security, to feel less alone and to ‘‘hang out. . ..’’ (European

SignBank meeting seminar material 2006).

These excerpts describe the consequences of an individualistic

lifestyle, where traditional institutions no longer satisfy consu-

mers’ need for social belonging and sense of community. The

document material includes similar narratives under the head-

ings of ‘‘New commandments’’ and ‘‘Give me some truth.’’

The former reports consumers’ tendency to demand brands that

help them impose a certain self-discipline and reduce the

plethora of choice offered by the marketplace. The latter exem-

plifies how SignBank enacts a consumer subject concerned

with the legitimacy, genuineness, and authenticity of brands.

Taken together, these narratives constitute myths of modernity,

in which products and brands should restore the sense of cer-

tainty and community that is lost with the breakdown of tradi-

tional societal institutions. In this way, the ideological content

circulating in and emanating from SignBank is not involved in

a particular national conversation, as Holt (2004) suggests.

Instead, the ideological content of the cultural narratives is

related to a shared experience of living in late modern society.

Thus, the sociocultural disruptions and tensions to which Sign-

Bank speaks are not related to a specific geographic location

but to the experience of living inside a certain societal model

dominated by market capitalism, individualization, science,

and reflexivity.

The cultural narratives could in this sense be described

through the notion of global structures of common difference

(Wilk 1995), which conceptualizes globalization as based on

global structures or formats of commonality exemplified by the

imagery of ‘‘the good mother’’ in the quotation. These formats

transcend traditional lines of division but are appropriated,

interpreted, and expressed differently across different contexts,

corresponding to the informant’s reference to the fact that the

aspiration of growing happy healthy kids is universal but

expresses itself differently across contexts. Following from the

perspective outlined in the quotation, the spatial references and

geography do not become obsolete owing to the shaping of

market realities through cultural narratives. Instead of

organizing markets along lines of separate national boundaries,

informants perceive places to be connected through systems of

meaning, and they consider themselves to be the experts able to

identify and navigate this complex reality.

From Sign to Product: Unfolding Client Markets

The way in which SignBank is mobilized in the course of

everyday advertising work differs in many ways from the

formal methodological prescriptions introduced above. In the

following text, we discuss how governmentality unfolds more

specifically in the practices of Signbank. Observation of the

way in which the signs and the cultural narratives are evoked

in new product development or branding makes obvious how

the spatial genesis of specific signs becomes more or less

irrelevant. The contribution of signs to a holistic, coherent, and

meaningful cultural narrative accounts for the narrative’s valid-

ity, legitimacy, not the degree of direct correspondence to a

given geographical area. One example, mentioned at the outset

of this article, is the Danish chocolate brand, Anthon Berg,

which has been through an overall process of brand reposition-

ing. SignBank played a decisive role in setting the overall

direction of the repositioning process and in the development

of concrete product concepts, as the quotation below

demonstrates.

SignBank is very, very important in the development of new

products. Of course [Anthon Berg] always must produce high

quality chocolate, but at the conceptual level SignBank is

decisive (Executive strategic planner DDB Copenhagen).




In the case of Anthon Berg, the arbitrariness of place is evident.

No correspondence is present between the geographical origin

of the signs, the locus of interpretation, and the national mar-

kets in which the new products are eventually launched. Thus,

the European SignBank narratives have been used extensively,

along with a more specific round of sign gathering throughout

the global organizational SignBank network. The sign-

gathering task was framed in terms of ‘‘look for signs within

the area of chocolate.’’ These two sources of market informa-

tion have formed the basis for the strategic and operational

processes of brand repositioning of products that are distributed

across fifteen countries that are not identical in terms of the

origins of the signs. Thus, SignBank engages in the renegotia-

tion of the meaning of place by ignoring the significance of

geographical origin. In this way, the method enacts a market

space that resists or circumvents the conventional conflation

of marketplace representations with the actual distribution of

the brand. Hence, it becomes clear that geographical market

spaces, which we normally take for granted, depend on interpre-

tive practices as much as the cultural narratives in SignBank do.

The difference made by SignBank is the reorganization of

market spaces from discrete geographical places to networked

assemblages of market spaces.

One example of a new product is related to the cultural nar-

rative of I-collectivism, which addresses anxieties related to

living in modern society and the erosion of traditional institu-

tions and social authorities characterizing this societal model.

The following quotation describes how this cultural narrative

becomes the springboard for new market opportunities for the

chocolate brand and how it manifests in a new product concept:

‘‘The consumer’s increased need for alliances, communities,

and positive togetherness creates room for chocolate in a new

social role’’ (SignBank seminar material narrative for

chocolate brand). The product is described by one informant

as the logical consequence of insight into the increased need

of consumers for new alliances—the product is ‘‘a facilitator

of social positive relations and [acts] as social glue.’’

The product consists of a thick block of high-quality dark

chocolate in an exclusive packaging that includes a wooden

stick to be used for breaking the chocolate into smaller pieces

and is described as simultaneously appealing to the increasing

consumer interest in high-quality chocolate and offering a little

social game of ‘‘who does the breaking.’’ In this way, the

consequence of modernity related to the erosion of traditional

institutions and social relationships is addressed by developing

a chocolate imagined to reestablish these with new forms of

sociality. The case of the chocolate brand demonstrates how the

relationship between the social and the spatial is reconfigured

as geography and is not evoked as a signifier of a particular

place and through reference to the nation-state, but as a signif-

ier of reflexivity on the global configuration of markets and

consumers’ shared experience of living on the edge of

modernity.

As Figure 3 illustrates, SignBank has reassembled this par-

ticular brand across new spatial configurations, showing that

taking a cultural perspective on market emergence not only

highlights the inseparability of the system from the

environment but equally demonstrates the relational, multiple,

and emergent character of market spaces.

The representation in Figure 3 is intended to demonstrate

how globalization imageries, which loosen the dependence

on geographical place, enact a market as a cultural space and

materialize in a geographically dispersed yet culturally

coherent assemblage and show governmentality at work in the

specific case of the development of the re-positioning of the

Anton Berg brand. The macro-level discourses are instantiated

in micro-level marketing and brand systems. However, the

macro and micro dimensions are not aligned with a global–

local distinction but rather appear as a deterritorialized

assemblage of elements that constitute the specific market

space connecting a variety of geographical and nongeographi-

cal entities into a new social space.

We have identified three discourses of globalization in our

data and have addressed the ways in which they produce the

spatial contours of market realities. Additionally, we have

pointed to the subject positions for employees at DDB, who are

engaged in the SignBank method, emerging through the variety

of globalization discourses and the materialization of reconfi-

gured market spaces for a particular client of the DDB agency.

Much more than prescribing a particular position to the

employees at Anthon Berg, through its multiplicity of globali-

zation discourses the SignBank method inserts a particular

identity position for the ideal client company, able and willing

to engage with the challenges of globalization as they are

depicted through SignBank.

Such representation of ‘‘the right kind’’ of client company

becomes evident when informants at DDB distinguish between

‘‘those who get it (SignBank) and those who don’t.’’ The

interviewees do not distinguish between different product

categories or industries to account for the different degree of

acceptance and use of SignBank by clients. Instead, they refer

to some clients as being ‘‘ready’’ for SignBank and some as

being ‘‘too linear or traditional’’ in their views to be able or

willing to take the insights from SignBank into account. Thus,

they engage in the production of organizational subject

positions for agency clients and therefore in the construction

of competent customers (Cova and Cova 2012). That is,

marketing practices not only govern employee or consumer

subjectivities, as previous research has demonstrated, but also

in our case market research practices in advertising constitute

central practices of market governmentality that produce

particular organizational identity positions.

Discussion and Conclusion

As firms increasingly regard globalization as a condition under

which they must operate, the character of market and consumer

research practices changes. However, one fundamental

assumption among marketers concerns the existence of cultural

differences, primarily along national boundaries but also across

lifestyle and demographic lines of division. This assumption

preoccupies marketers with the dilemma of how to address




consumers in different markets. A multiplicity of discourses on

globalization assists marketers in making sense of their global

market reality and organizing their marketing activities. Thus,

we argue that what we could call the popular memory of globa-

lization (Thompson and Tian 2008)—defined as the shared

vocabulary for making sense of globalization processes and its

impact on this particular market actor—becomes the cultural

category most decisively engaged in structuring marketing

activities.

In the following, we synthesize our findings in relation to

spatiality as introduced by Massey (2005). We do so by highlight-

ing the mutual constituency of three elements: market research as

a cultural practice, myths of globalization, and the market and

organizational context of the advertising agency. The interrela-

tionship of these three elements constitutes a specific form of glo-

bal governmentality. That is, these marketing practices produce

sociohistorically embedded versions of ‘‘the market’’ by lever-

aging discourses of globalization, and they simultaneously insti-

tute moral ways of conduct for employees at the advertising

agency, for the client companies, and ultimately for consumers

dispersed in the renewed cultural market space.

(1) In globalizing markets, marketing practices are

increasingly addressing the problem of articulating the

spatiality of the market. This articulation occurs in

specific networks of interrelationships (Massey 2005).

In our case, the interrelationships include the setup, meth-

odology, organizational culture of DDB, and design of the

SignBank organization. The identity politics of being a

member of the SignBank community constitute particu-

larly important, translocal interrelationships that become

constitutive of market spatiality for the marketing system

that is Signbank. This process demonstrates how market-

ing governmentality becomes part of constructing coher-

ent global identities intraorganizationally, from the

shared practices of generating representations of consu-

mers. Organizational identities can then globalize desta-

bilizing or relativizing individual workers’ frames of

identity reference, further diminishing the dominance of

the nation-state as the primary frame of reference.

(2) We have pointed to the coexistence of several globaliza-

tion ideologies that serve as interpretive templates for

marketers and are activated and legitimate in different

organizational settings. We have emphasized the

divergence between the globalization ideology used to

establish agency corporate identity vis-a-vis competitors

and clients and the ideology that governs everyday adver-

tising work. The implication is that globalization ideolo-

gies address a multiplicity of tensions and hence

constitute a multiplicity of market spaces (Massey 2005)

Brand re-positioning:

“From dusty grandma

to modern hedonist”

New products

New production

facilities

Organic cocoa

bean production

in Ghana New market

communication

Flagship

brand store in

Copenhagen

Education of the sales

and marketing staff

Strategic

management

seminars Government webpage

on experience

economy

Organization

webpage and wider

media exposure of

the company

DDB: uses this brand

as a showpiece

internally and

externally

Figure 3. Assemblage of client marketing space.




that goes beyond nation-state ideological tensions and thus

is denoted global governmentality. We have demonstrated

how marketing ideologies of space are not merely repre-

sentational but are productive in that they delineate and

in some cases expand the potentiality of market definitions.

(3) As a consequence, market spaces are never fixed and static

but are always emergent through market practices. In the

case developed here, different forms of market spatiality

emerged for different products, in different national

contexts and from different practices of utilizing the

cultural narratives in different branches of the organization.

This investigation extends discussions of the myth market in

the consumer culture theory field. As became evident in our

case, competing in myth markets stretches beyond addressing

ideological tensions in the nation-state space. Our empirical

site in an advertising agency extends the discussion of the

formation of myth markets beyond the cocreative processes

among organizations and their consumers (Holt 2004) but also

beyond the competition among locally situated mythmakers

(Thompson and Tian 2008). We demonstrate how the forma-

tion of market mythologies takes place in deterritorialized

transnational advertising practices and governs the marketing

decisions of agency clients. Our case demonstrates how myth

markets operate higher up in the value chain,in the business-to-

business market—in this case how DDB competes in the global

advertising industry. Our study hence shows that myth marketing

is as much a sense-making and enactment exercise of the

organization’s market and client subjects as it is an addressing

of the anxieties of business-to-consumer marketers operating in

a seemingly chaotic global market. We demonstrate how the

global is not an abstract symbolic category outside the local realm

of marketing practices but an emergent and very material social

space in the form of cultural marketing systems. This depiction

has implications for the understanding of the global and the local,

as these are predominantly understood as, respectively, abstract

and concrete in studies of marketing and consumer culture.

The interrelationship of marketing and society as the overall

focus for macromarketing has been studied across various

dimensions, including levels of aggregation, the interplay of

various structural parts of the marketing system, temporality,

and spatiality. However, the symbolic dimension of marketing

systems has been addressed only sporadically in a macromar-

keting context (Kadirov and Varey 2011). A global

governmentality perspective enables us to investigate the

contemporary marketing systems (Kadirov and Varey 2011;

Venkatesh 1999) beyond a pregiven global–local dualism.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to

the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,

authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Bios

Sofie Møller Bjerrisgaard is the head of partner relations at Business

Kolding. She holds a PhD in marketing from University of Southern

Denmark, where she has also worked as an assistant professor. Her

research evolves around the discoursive and performative dimension

of marketing practices.

Dannie Kjeldgaard is the professor of marketing at the University of

Southern Denmark. Dannie’s work analyzes change processes of

market-based glocalization in domains such as place branding, brand-

ing, media, and identity construction, global consumer segments, body

culture, ethnicity, and qualitative methodology. His research is pub-

lished in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer

Behaviour, Consumption, Markets and Culture, Marketing Theory,

Journal of Macromarketing, and in several anthologies.




Documents

How Market Research Shapes Market Spatiality: A Global Governmentality Perspective